35.6769°N / 139.7639°E · Japan
Tokyo is one of the few great cities whose map is organised around a void. At the centre, the moats and woods of the imperial palace, where no street passes. Everything else turns around it.
You choose the framing, the palette and the words of the caption. The work is drawn from real data, then printed to order in the workshop closest to you.
From that void runs a figure you will find nowhere else: the spiral of the Edo moats, unwound to the right from the castle as far as the Sumida. Around it, the lacework of alleys is extremely fine and has no legible axes. Tokyo never had a grid: do not transpose Kyoto’s onto it, which takes its own from the plan of Heian-kyo. Here it is a spiral.
To the west, the Musashino plateau, cut by valleys, carries the finest alleys. To the east, the alluvial plain and two watercourses that must not be confused: the Sumida, winding, which is the old bed of the Arakawa, and today’s Arakawa, a straight canal dug in the twentieth century. And on the bay, islands won from the water, square-cornered, cutting against everything before them.
A single dark ink, a very light ground, and the water in a muted blue green. Tokyo has neither a dominant stone nor a dominant tile, no material colours the city in mass: it is the fineness and extreme density of the network of alleys that makes the texture. The palette therefore has to work on two widely separated values, so that lacework stays a grey weave and does not close into a black field in print. Keep the colour for the moats, the Sumida and the bay.
Portrait, centred on the palace, the bay at the bottom: the subject is circular, not linear. The frame has to hold the void of the palace, the Sumida across its whole run, and a fringe of the bay with its reclaimed land. The Yamanote rail loop, which everyone cites, is drawn here as a very fine line, and some backgrounds remove it altogether: do not count on it to hold the composition. Nor should you expect a map covered with street names: in Japan streets barely carry any, addresses work by district and plot. It is the density of the line that has to carry the drawing.
The title, a line beneath it, the coordinates. The name of a district, a date, the name of a station: that line is what turns a plan of Tokyo into your plan of Tokyo.
Sixteen inks, in the configurator’s order. It is not in the catalogue, but you will find it in the palette library, filed under its material.
Opens the colour workshop with these 16 inks in place: change one, keep the rest.
It will wait in your account, ready for any piece.
Starting from the castle at the centre, the moats unwind in a right-hand spiral, join the Kanda river, then called the Hirakawa, and empty into the Sumida. The network served as defence as much as a waterway for bringing in building materials. The city was in fact made by earthworks: the Hibiya inlet, facing the castle, was filled in as soon as Tokugawa Ieyasu arrived, and the Hirakawa diverted.
The Sumida is the old course of the Arakawa: twenty-seven kilometres long, it separates from it today at Iwabuchi, and the diversion dates from the end of the Meiji era. After the great flood of 1910, which damaged much of central Tokyo, a diversion canal of twenty-two kilometres was dug from 1911 onward: that is today’s Arakawa, the straight line on the east of the map. The mistake is common, and it shows.
Odaiba owes its name and its shape to artillery batteries built out on the bay from 1853 against Perry’s fleet: only six of the eleven planned were completed. The present landfill, known as reclaimed land number 13, was finished in 1979 and joined to battery number 3. What the map shows to the south-east is therefore not a coastline, it is a date.
Yes. The search covers the whole world, from a capital to a hamlet. For the Sky collection, any date works, past or future: the sky is calculated.
From 21 × 29.7 cm to 84.1 × 118.9 cm, that is A4 to A0, portrait or landscape depending on the material. Every size is shown with its price in the editor.
Four, from the barest to the most dressed.
Allow 1 to 4 working days for making, up to 7 for hand-assembled frames and canvases, then 1 to 6 working days in transit with standard delivery.
Digital editions are available immediately: the file of your piece is emailed to you as soon as you order.
The station where you changed, the street behind the big avenue, the bridge over the Sumida. The void at the centre is the same for everyone. What you put around it is not.
Compose my Tokyo poster
